EDITORIAL TAKING ON GANGS CITY MUST OFFER MORE THAN JUST ASSERTIVE POLICING.

SAY goodbye to CRASH, and hello to GIT.

Ever since the Rampart scandal, the Los Angeles Police Department has been looking for a new anti-gang program - and a new acronym - to deal with the urban terrorists that have wrought havoc on the city's streets.

It's found its answer in Gang Impact Teams, the new century's version of Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums, the infamous units that brought about the Rampart Division scandals. The GITs, implemented in March in all of the LAPD's 18 divisions, integrate gang officers, detectives and narcotic investigators - as well as community watchdogs - to put the screws to L.A. gangbangers.

Let's hope GIT will do a better job than CRASH of walking the fine line between Chief William Bratton's ``assertive'' policing and LAPD's old ``aggressive'' policing.

It's a delicate balance.

On the one hand, there's an obvious need to be proactive in the way the police combat gangs. That much was made plain in the aftermath of Rampart, when the LAPD yanked its anti-gang efforts, and the gangs responded by taking over entire neighborhoods.

But proactive policing runs the very real risk of trampling civil liberties, Rampart being the obvious case in point.

New Police Chief William Bratton has made his career on assertive police work, a strategy that helped him significantly cut crime - and create enemies among civil libertarians - as chief in Boston and New York.

Bratton has already incorporated the strategy here, most dramatically downtown, where the LAPD has cracked down with extreme force on the Skid Row homeless population.

But so far, what's been billed as assertive policing has looked a lot more like an assault on civil liberties, which is why it's invited a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.

In an apparent throwback to the vagrancy laws of past generations, cops have rousted out homeless people by the dozens for the ``crime'' of congregating on the sidewalk, even though the city has granted them squatter's rights for decades and failed to develop alternatives.

Instead of cracking down on real criminals, the department is simply harassing the down and out, for reasons that have more to do with benefiting downtown developers than helping the helpless.

For the LAPD's new anti-gang efforts to work - and to pass constitutional muster - they must be quite different from the LAPD's assault on the homeless.

Giving gangbangers no quarter is fine, but they also need alternatives. It's not enough to bust at-risk youth when - like the homeless - they have no other place to go.

The city of Los Angeles needs to supplement its Police Department's efforts with real educational and professional opportunities, as well as cultural support, so that avoiding prison isn't the only reason to stay out of a gang.

As anti-gang activist William ``Blinky'' Rodriguez warns, ``There's a brand of suppression that breeds rebellion.'' The city needs ``more opportunities, more people to cultivate relationships to breathe a new vision into (gang members) that there's hope.''

Anything less isn't a real anti-gang strategy, it's just a new acronym for a failed, old policy.